Tip: Speed up your computer

It’s true that when you delete a file from your hard drive, an expert could recover it, provided it hasn’t been overwritten by additional data.

It’s also true that in Windows, recently deleted data is kept track of in the Recycle Bin, which allows you to restore the files to their original state and their original location. The files kept track of by Recycle Bin do take up space — in some cases, a lot of space — and they can potentially slow down your computer by hogging disk space that would otherwise be used by your operating system to perform its best.

If you don’t manually empty the Recycle Bin periodically, over time you could find that deleted data is actually taking up gigabytes worth of space. So your first stop in attempting to free hard drive space should be to empty the Recycle Bin. To do so, right click the Recycle Bin, and from the resulting pop-up menu, click Empty Recycle Bin.

You might also want to explicitly set the size of the recycle bin by right clicking on it and then moving the slider to your needed size. Remember the more empty space on your drives the faster your pcs are.